COULD THIS BE YOU?

Did you read the Twilight series, even though the lack of plot and the terrible writing made you secretly hate yourself and weep in the night?

Are you now pining, even BURNING, for more gorgeous aloof rich heroes with funny-colored eyes to sweep you away to magical lands where you will discover your special destiny and incredible beauty, but you don’t know where to turn because Midnight Sun has been delayed indefinitely?

Would you like to recover at least SOME of your self-respect?

Then RUN, don’t WALK, to find C.L. Wilson’s Tairen Soul series.

Four books about the incredible, magical, soul-bonded love between a rich, powerful, sexy fairy king with glowing purple eyes who can turn into a gigantic flying cat and his too-thin, too-red-haired ordinary girl soulmate who turns out to have the power to RESTORE SOULS, heal wounds and generally to be the most Unique and Special Elf/Person in the Universe.

Together, they fight crime argue a lot about whether she’ll be able to love him enough to keep him from going insane, whether she deserves his magnificent love, whether her family will let her go, who loves who more, whether she’ll make a good queen of Fairyland and other riveting topics.

BUT WAIT, there’s MORE!

UNLIKE the Twilight series, these books come pre-loaded with two-dimensional characters (one more than Twilight!), a standard set of fantasy plots and subplots involving evil wizards and politicking, and actual attempts at world-building!

PLUS, for a limited time only, the writing is actually OKAY and doesn’t make you want to GOUGE YOUR EYES OUT every other page.

Are you INTERESTED? YOU SHOULD BE!!!!

C.L. Wilson’s Tairen Soul series: The (sort of) thinking person’s Twilight. READ IT NOW!

Brown papers to obscure the lurid cover graphics not included. Offer void where better fantasy books are available. Self-awareness, complexity and realism sold separately.

Critical Praise:

**Four star review** “It’s crack, but at least it’s good crack.” – DP, Grad Student Escapism Weekly

“… It blows my mind!” -Mike, Testosterone Review (no stars)

Laurie R. King is best known for her two long-running mystery series, one set in the England in the Roaring Twenties and starring Mary Russell as Sherlock Holmes’ feminist wife and the other set in modern-day San Francisco and focusing on lesbian detective Kay Martinelli. In addition, King writes the occasional stand-alone novel—most recently, Touchstone. Common to all of King’s writing are vividly written and painstakingly researched portraits of place and time. While her series focus on more conventional mystery plots, the majority of King’s standalone novels are psychological meditations on obsession, integrity and the cost of the human search for truth.

In Touchstone, King returns to England in the 1920’s, this time in the midst of the economic and political disruption that preceded the General Strike of 1926. Harris Stuyvesant, an American federal agent, has traveled to England on the tail of an anarchist bomber responsible for crippling his brother and killing his fiancée. In order to gain access to his potential bomber, Stuyvesant is led to Bennett Grey, also called Touchstone. After being nearly killed by a shell in World War II, Grey has developed an intense sensitivity to the cues and details of his environment, making him a human lie detector. Grey’s former lover, Lady Laura Hurleigh, is currently involved with Stuyvesant’s suspected bomber, and Stuyvesant uses Grey to infiltrate the high-class anarchist’s social circle. Unfortunately, a sinister operative named Aldous Carstairs is trying to coerce Grey into his service, while simultaneously plotting a Machiavellian overthrow of the British government.

If the plot seems complex, it is; King has situated the story in the midst of a turbulent time in British politics, and adding the supernatural element of a character who can read truth with a touch could make for a too-crowded story. King’s masterful evocation of detail and skilled prose, however, make both the potential anarchist revolution and the human lie detector go down smoothly, allowing the majority of the novel to focus on King’s major themes: the seductive power of a terrorist ideology and the difference between conviction and goodness. In Touchstone, many characters are convinced of the truth of their beliefs, but as Stuyvesant discovers, this only makes them more dangerous. The explosive denouement begs the question of whether a radical can be right and demands an immediate second reading to watch King lay the groundwork for her final twist.

If there is any weakness in this story, it lies in King’s intense focus on the feelings, thoughts and reactions of her characters, which results in a somewhat weakened plot. Touchstone is less a mystery than a character study of fanaticism, in which the great question is not who the bomber is, but what the drive to bomb means. The main characters’ personal involvements with one another and with various ideologies take center stage, and even the various bomb threats later in the novel are presented mainly as an opportunity to allow Stuyvesant to realize where his loyalties (and his heart) truly lie. Similarly, the character of Grey is more metaphorical than practical; much is made of the fact that his truth-sensing ability is an affliction rather than a gift, and his truth-sensing capacity is used mainly to illuminate personal secrets rather than political ones. As a novel of ideas, Touchstone is excellent, but those expecting big action, supernatural twists or neatly tied-off loose ends will be disappointed.

In the end, I didn’t remember the characters’ names, nor could I recall exactly what had happened when. What stayed with me were King’s insights into the minds of terrorists, her empathetic evocation of how an intelligent person can come to advocate the violent overthrow of their society and the creation of an idealized new order. King is excellent at getting in under the reader’s guard. In Touchstone, we experience the seductive pull of anarchy while simultaneously recoiling from its ultimate consequences. 3.5/5 stars.

Probably best-known for his hard-scifi series starring Honor Harrington, David Weber is a classic science fiction writer of the old school. His stories investigate the ways in which humans are changed by the technology they invent and the new experiences, decisions and possibilities opened to them by the discovery of interstellar travel, artificial intelligence, time travel or non-human forms of life. Worlds of Weber is a new Subterranean Press collection of 9 previously-published short stories and novellas. The collection is a kind of appetizer sampler, representing not a particular culinary idea but the style of an entire restaurant. Weber fans may find this collection an ideal gateway drug for creating new fans, as almost every story included is only the first of a series or the germinating seed for a larger novel. It will be released in October of this year.

A triumvirate of stories (“A Beautiful Friendship,” “Miles to Go,” and “The Traitor”) focus on the partnership of man and the other, a partnership made possible by the forces of technology. In “Miles to Go” and “The Traitor,” Weber focuses on artificially intelligent, sentient war machines, built to protect planets and fight battles at speeds the human brain could not fathom. But with sentience comes emotions; as the machines bond with their human allies, they become capable of greater courage, and greater sacrifice, than either machine or creator had imagined. “A Beautiful Friendship” also explores the ability of emotion to inspire a bond as it tells the story of first contact between humans and treecats, a sentient, tree-dwelling alien species discovered in the Harrington universe.

“In the Navy,” “Sir George and the Dragon,” and “Sword Brother” exemplify Weber’s belief in the resourcefulness of human beings and the goodness of human culture, particularly male human beings and Western culture. “In the Navy” sees a small American town transported in time and place to Medieval Germany, while “Sir George and the Dragon,” an offshoot of David Drake’s universe in “Ranks of Bronze” and “Foreign Legions,” shows us the life of a group of medieval English soldiers captured by aliens on their way to France. In “Sword Brother,” Weber goes topical, as magic summons a burned-out military man (and his LAV-25) from Iraq to fight in a magical battle between Good and Evil. In all of these situations, the transported people eventually triumph through their adaptability, reinforcing or rediscovering their strongly-held values. “In the Navy” is a traditional paean to men who are too tough, too hard, too driven to fit in well in modern society; in the harshness of Weber’s medieval setting, these “manly” men flourish while others founder. “Sir George and the Dragon” is a story any good Anglophile will enjoy, as the stout English bowmen outsmart their morally crude, though technologically advanced, alien captor. And in “Sword Brother,” our hero joins with the forces of good, fights evil (in the form of icky bug-like creatures, deadly-but-hot women, and slimy-looking men) and comes to a realization about his moral purpose in Iraq.

“The Captain from Kirkbean” may be the most interesting story in the mix, because it is the least sfnal. The story includes both of Weber’s main themes: the resourcefulness of man’s spirit and the role of technology in shaping human experience, but it plays out these themes in a straight-up, O’Brien-esque Napoleonic sea-battle. There is science (since the story takes place entirely on a warship and the action hinges partially on the capabilities of the English and French ships), and it is certainly fiction, but in this case the unknown that is discovered is the unknown of the sea and the people who fight on her. The story and treatment are familiar, but placing the tale in an otherwise clearly sfnal anthology raises the question of what, exactly, we mean when we say “science fiction.”

Of the other stories, there is less to say. “Ms. Midshipwoman Harrington” introduces us to Honor Harrington at the beginning of her service and in all her glory; it’s a typical coming-of-age story as the plucky Harrington triumphs over harassment, discrimination, prejudice, and space-borne attackers on her first military cruise. “A Certain Talent” is a rogue’s tale and the tale of a rogue; one gets the feeling it was included in this anthology simply because it had no better fit anywhere else. Overall, the stories in this anthology are like the science-fiction equivalent of comfort food; familiar and safe, with no sharp corners or surprising tastes to cause discomfort or inspire questioning. In the Worlds of Weber, humanity has been good and will continue to be good, as long as men are brave and the bad guys are obvious.

The book describes networking in terms even a child could understand, choosing to anthropomorphize the underlying packet structure. The ping packet is described as a duck, who, with other packets (more ducks), spends a certain period of time on the host machine (the wise-eyed boat). At the same time each day (I suspect this is scheduled under cron), the little packets (ducks) exit the host (boat) by way of a bridge (a bridge). From the bridge, the packets travel onto the internet (here embodied by the Yangtze River).

The title character — er, packet, is called Ping. Ping meanders around the river before being received by another host (another boat). He spends a brief time on the other boat, but eventually returns to his original host machine (the wise-eyed boat) somewhat the worse for wear.

The book avoids many of the cliches one might expect. For example, with a story set on a river, the authors might have sunk to using that tired old plot device: the flood ping. The authors deftly avoid this.

Who Should Buy This Book
If you need a good, high-level overview of the ping utility, this is the book. I can’t recommend it for most managers, as the technical aspects may be too overwhelming and the basic concepts too daunting.

Problems With This Book
As good as it is, The Story About Ping is not without its faults. There is no index, and though the ping(8) man pages cover the command line options well enough, some review of them seems to be in order. Likewise, in a book solely about Ping, I would have expected a more detailed overview of the ICMP packet structure.

But even with these problems, The Story About Ping has earned a place on my bookshelf, right between Stevens’ Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, and my dog-eared copy of Dante’s seminal work on MS Windows, Inferno. Who can read that passage on the Windows API (“Obscure, profound it was, and nebulous, So that by fixing on its depths my sight — Nothing whatever I discerned therein.”), without shaking their head with deep understanding. But I digress.

For my next review, I will discuss the internals of several well-known routing protocols as described in the Old Testament. New contemporary evidence points to the possibility that Job was a sysadmin on an early MULTICS system.

[April Fools! -Stephanie]

[This review is a joke, obviously. It was originally written by Doc Technical over on Slashdot, and the link is here. This is copyright 1999 by Hemos, apparently, and I am using it without permission. I also don't make any money off this blog, so it's probably less wrong than, say, the person who re-posted it on Amazon.com without attributing it to the original author.]

[Also, it's probably much funnier if you actually know Unix commands. Which I don't, really, but I do know how to ping something.]